A happy birthday to Ginette Reno

Reno stole the show at the Canadiens’ first two home playoff games at the Bell Centre against the Tampa Bay Lightning with her powerful, heart-pumping rendition of O Canada. Reno had to get the OK from her cardiologist before singing the anthem for the second time.

I was sitting in the press room at the Bell Centre during the first intermission of Game 4 when some younger journalists were wondering who Reno was. I told them she was a huge star – and beautiful – during her younger days, appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Reno was Céline before there was a Céline Dion.

I remember my parents – who came to Montreal from Scotland and spoke almost no French – listening to her albums when I was a kid.

Reno has surely earned some new, younger fans with her O Canada performances.

Below is an article Brendan Kelly wrote for The Gazette back in 1992 when Reno was voted the woman most admired by men in Quebec in a poll for Chatelaine magazine:

(Photo by Dario Ayala/The Gazette)

Life at the top doesn’t faze energetic Reno

PUBLISHED IN THE GAZETTE ON MARCH 6, 1996

BRENDAN KELLY THE GAZETTE

Ginette Reno knows that Quebecers really like her. The 45- year-old singer figures most households in Quebec possess at least one of her records. Certainly a lot of people have the Je ne Suis Qu’une Chanson album, which still holds the record as the best-selling homegrown francophone album of all time in Quebec.

The veteran local vedette can still pull in the crowds, too: she is booked for 16 nights at Theatre St. Denis this month, and there’s already talk of more shows being added in May.

And she thrives on that affection. Reno owns a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley, but she much prefers driving around town in her little Toyota van, because it has her name painted on the side.

People wave as she drives by, or stop to say hello. A truck driver recently pulled his 18-wheeler to the side of the road and jumped out to greet the singer.

Still, none of that prepared Reno for the recent poll in Chatelaine magazine which reported that Reno is the woman most admired by men in Quebec. People figured the results must be wrong. Or that the men were lying. Someone suggested that the men surveyed must be masochists.

Reno was as surprised by the results as everyone else.

“It was a shock,” Reno says, in an interview at a downtown restaurant.

“I look at my body and say, `Why me? Why not someone more sexy?’ But I’m finding out more things about men. Men do want a strong woman, they like to have a courageous person next to them. Some men, not all. There are still some men that go for the Barbies.

“With all the feminists, women don’t know what they want anymore, and they’ve mixed up the men; they want to cry too, and they want a shoulder to cry on.”

Reno promises that there will be a few jokes about the poll in her new show – which premiered at Theatre St. Denis last night – but, all kidding aside, she figures maybe there’s something to the Chatelaine results.

“Men like to be mothered and I’m a good mother,” she says. “There are men who like me a lot and they admire me. And there are others that are afraid of me. Some men tell me that I’m too strong, and they don’t want that.”

Then, mixing her metaphors, Reno adds: “I’ve been a good wife and it’s been a good marriage. I haven’t been unfaithful. I have the feeling that they know me. They’ve lived through me.”

The singer has been a staple of Quebec show biz for more than 30 years, and she was belting out her fairly traditional, middle-of- the-road pop long before there was a francophone rock scene here. Reno was singing in English before Celine Dion was even born.

Reno lived in London in the early ’70s, and, a couple of years later, she spent some time trying to launch her career in Los Angeles. But she’s never managed to duplicate her local success outside the province.

“Every time success was coming, I left,” Reno says. “I did Las Vegas with Don Rickles, I did the Tonight Show, the Merv Griffin Show. Something was beginning. And I left. The same with England. I did a TV series with Roger Whittaker. Then I got pregnant and left. I’ve always been very afraid of success.”

But Reno wants to take another shot at the English market, and she’s heading down to Nashville in the next few months to record some songs, including a couple of new ones from Canadian songwriter Shirley Eikhard (who wrote Bonnie Raitt’s Something to Talk About). She feels more ready for it now, and says it took years of therapy to come to grips with her insecurities about herself and her career.

She is the first to admit that her weight is one of the causes of that insecurity.

“I’d like to lose 100 pounds,” Reno says. “I know I will solve this. Now I can say no to a lot of things. I want to get used to saying no to desserts.

“Let’s say I’m eating chips. Why eat chips? You want to fight? Call up somebody and fight. Sometimes I say, `I’d like some ice cream.’ Then I say: `What do you want? Do you want to be held? Go and hold somebody. Tell them you love them. Give them some tenderness.’

“I’m finding out a lot of things about myself emotionally. I’m trying to get some weight inside of me so I can lose it outside of me.”

It was a rough autumn for Reno: She spent three emotionally draining months acting in the soon-to-be-released movie Leolo, which is hot Quebec director Jean-Claude Lauzon’s follow-up to Un Zoo, la Nuit. At first, Reno turned down the offer to make her movie debut because she felt Lauzon’s drama about a troubled family was just too heavy.

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